Leave the Seat Empty: 2101 West Sunnyside Avenue

Leave the Seat Empty consists of photos taken of buildings in Chicago in between the time a demolition permit is issued and the time the wrecking crews come.

The vast majority of the city's demolitions are vernacular residential buildings in areas that are either seeing immense new investment or immense ongoing disinvestment. In most cases, the doomed buildings are not deemed architecturally or culturally notable enough for proactive preservation efforts to succeed, where such efforts exist. They are most frequently replaced by new single family homes, or by empty land. These patterns aren't universal among demolitions, but are common outcomes of Chicago's current legal and market environment around land use, building vacancy, and new construction.

Despite its international reputation as a destination for architecture tourism, Chicago's policies around building demolitions often fail to protect historic structures. There are no easy answers to the question of which buildings should remain standing under which circumstances, but residents lack easy access to information about upcoming demolitions, leaving them unable to campaign effectively against demolitions they might oppose. I seek to document many of Chicago's doomed buildings in their final days, often with green demo fencing already up, and be present to acknowledge their disappearance.

2101 West Sunnyside Avenue
Permit issued 10/31/2023

 

 

This home in Ravenswood has a surprisingly sparse trail of documentation supporting storytelling about its history. The City of Chicago lacks records about its construction. Very few of its residents ever drew news coverage, even during an era when going over to dinner at a neighbor's house would often earn a writeup in local papers. And for the last several decades of its existence, the structure itself stood shrouded by trees and shrubs, its full facade obscured from passers-by. That vegetation was removed shortly before demolition in 2023, offering views of the building that had not been possible for a long, long time.

 

Though its corner turret and other architectural cues might suggest late 1800s construction on first glance, this home that stood at the southwest corner of Sunnyside & Seeley likely dates from the first decade of the 20th Century, showcasing a style that was fading from favor at the time of its construction. It does not appear in an 1894 Sanborn fire insurance map of the then-developing Ravenswood neighborhood, which was founded as a suburb in the 1860s and annexed into Chicago city limits in 1889. It also is not listed in 1900 Census records of the neighborhood, but a newspaper ad from 1907 seeking a domestic servant mentions its original address of 317 Sunnyside Avenue - the earliest mention I've found.

Though I can't be certain that they were the first family to live in the home because early records are so sparse, the family who were there by the time of the 1910 Census were relatively locally notable. The Fellinghams, Robert and Gertrude, were active in local political and civic circles. Robert was a lawyer, running his own small firm downtown at the time the family lived in this home, and Gertrude was a full-time mother who also served as president of the Junior Auxiliary of the Ravenswood Womens' Club. They had two children, raised first in this home and then later in a more modern, en vogue six-unit building a mile east in Sheridan Park.

Robert would eventually work for Standard Oil Company of Indiana, a precursor to Amoco that operated the massive Whiting refinery that still runs today under BP ownership. He rose to become the large company's General Counsel by the time he retired in 1939. He and Gertrude then left Chicago, commissioning a custom Colonial-style home in northwest suburban Barrington from local architect Otokar Cerny. In 1951 they made a final move to Tulsa, Oklahoma to join their son, Fred, who had became a noted oil industry booster and lobbyist in the southwestern United States. Robert would pass away in 1957, and Gertrude in 1963. Both of their children who were raised in the Sunnyside home have since died, as well.

 

 

The house in Ravenswood passed through several hands after the Fellinghams moved out for their Sheridan Park apartment in the early '20s. Ravenswood never experienced the severe boom-bust cycles of some other Chicago neighborhoods, but its cachet declined somewhat as its housing stock aged and generational patterns led many families out to postwar suburbs. The median residents of the area's single family homes shifted from upper middle class white collar families to more tenuously middle class families, and for some time in the middle of the century a small apartment was carved out of this building's uppermost level, its rent likely supplementing the income of the homeowner.

 

By the 1980s, that extra unit had been deconverted back into a regular part of the single family home's space, and in 1984 the last family to occupy the house before its demolition purchased it from the estate of the previous owner for $31,750. The timing placed them near the bottom of Ravenswood's perceived desirability curve on the real estate market. Soon, the neighborhood would be on a path to what it is now - one of the most popular places in Chicago for professional class families with children, 30-something or 40-something couples, and young white collar workers with high-salary jobs to choose as their long-term home.

In 2023, members of the family that purchased the Sunnyside house in 1984 moved to a newer multi-unit building - just like the Fellinghams did almost exactly a century before them. They sold the old house in an off-market transaction to an LLC controlled by local realtor and developer Frank Bomher, who tore it down to build a speculative 6-bedroom, 6-bathroom house with a $2.15 million price tag. The private nature of the sale meant that no listing photos were created showcasing the old house, so aside from a few photographs I made inside when offered an opportunity to walk through the building just before demolition, there may not ever be any photos of its interior surfaced to public view.

 

 

The newly constructed house on the property sold in October of 2024, and now its first owner is charting a new history for a new building - hopefully one whose corresponding records will be easier to find when that house, too, is demolished one day.